XML->sexpr ideas [was Re: Name for the set of characters legal in identifiers]

From: Kenny Tilton (ktilton_at_nyc.rr.com)
Date: 01/16/04 

Date: Thu, 15 Jan 2004 23:56:25 GMT

Thomas A. Russ wrote:

> wallacethinmintr@eircom.net (Russell Wallace) writes:
>
>> (defun )(')( ...)
>
>
> (defun |)(;)| ( ...)
>
>
>>That won't work; (, ) and ' are "punctuation" (?) and normally
>>recognized by the reader as special characters. (I'm talking about the
>>normal case, not what you can persuade the reader, interner or
>>whatever to do if you try hard enough :))
>
>
> Of course, surrounding the symbol name with vertical bars might be
> considered "trying hard enough" by some people.

That's how I might have felt until I found myself with the requirement
to parse some useful metadata out of an XML dtd. <yechh> Now it seems
like the most natural thing in the world to code:

    (case tag-id
      (|BeginString| ...)
      (|MsgType| ...)
      (|CheckSum| ...))

Speaking of which, this is related to a Lisp NYC project to create a toy
exchange with a FIX (Financial Info Exchange) protocol interface. The
original protocol was a flat "tag=value;"+ format. An XML version was
developed and a DTD along with it, which I used just to get the metadata.

Now we want to leave the land of XML behind and write out a nice sexpr
variant of the same metadata as /our/ spec (we do not have to worry
about matching the real Fix tit for tat since this is a toy exchange not
meant as a FIX client testbed).

Of course it is easy enough for me to come up with a sexpr format off
the top of my head, but I seem to recall someone (Erik? Tim? Other?)
saying they had done some work on a formal approach to an alternative to
XML/HTML/whatever.

True that? If so, I am all ears.

kt 

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